Texas is the 7th state to secede from the Union, Feb. 1, 1861
By: Andrew Glass
February 1, 2011 04:51 AM EST

On this day in 1861, Texas became the seventh state to secede from the Union. A state convention in Austin voted 166-8 in favor of secession. Some 76 percent of Texans who participated in a statewide referendum had voted to secede. Texas joined the Confederate States of America on March 2, 1861.

Gov. Sam Houston, a hero of Texas’s war for independence who was then in his third term, sat in silence during the vote. The convention delegates ousted Houston from the governorship when he refused to take an oath of allegiance to the Confederacy. Houston said Texans were “stilling the voice of reason” and predicted an “ignoble defeat” for the South.

Texas was an integral part of the South’s cotton-based economy; its planters depended heavily on slave labor. In 1860, about 30 percent of the state’s population of 640,000 were slaves. John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry, Va., in 1859, had raised the specter of a slave insurrection. Moreover, the rise of the Republican Party, which favored limiting slavery, made many Texans uneasy about remaining in the Union.

During the Civil War, Texas mainly served as a logistical base for Confederate forces until mid-1863, when the Union’s seizure of the Mississippi River blocked further wide-scale movement of men, horses and cattle from the state. Nonetheless, throughout the war, Texas regiments fought in nearly every major battle.

Confederate forces won the last battle of the Civil War, the Battle of Palmito Ranch, on May 12, 1865, on the banks of the Rio Grande, about 12 miles east of Brownsville. This was more than a month after Gen. Robert E. Lee had surrendered to Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House in Virginia. Word of the Confederacy’s collapse had yet to reach the combatants.

SOURCE: “TEXAS IN THE CONFEDERACY: AN EXPERIMENT IN NATION BUILDING,” BY CLAYTON JEWETT (2002)